The seminar will examine the recent upsurge of critical and theoretical interest in the histories and practices of ‘artwriting’–a form of elaborate rhetorical discourse about art that is placed between biographies of artists, connoisseurship, academic art history, art criticism, art theory, aesthetics, and gallery- and museum-based writing. We will focus on canonical English-language texts from the later nineteenth century to the present (e.g., John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Violet Paget through Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf and onwards in the British tradition), some recent (later 20th and 21st century) ‘artwriters’ in Europe, America, and beyond, and both older and current scholarly and critical literature about artwriting and artwriters. We might make use of the recordings and publications of recent major international conferences on artwriting at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Courtauld Institute in London.

Open to qualified undergraduates with the advance permission of the instructor.